


Gatherers

by Zdenka



Series: Spooktober 2019 [1]
Category: A Dark Room (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Post-Apocalypse, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-25 16:10:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20914886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zdenka/pseuds/Zdenka
Summary: Gathering wood for the fire.





	Gatherers

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Spooktober 2019](https://spooktoberchallenge.dreamwidth.org/732.html), for the prompts "shiver" and "alien encounter".
> 
> A Dark Room is a game that can be found [here](http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/). I've only played the browser version, so this isn't compliant with the app version. I've used a few direct quotations from the game.

The sky is grey and the wind blows relentlessly. Anna shivers, cold even in her layers of fur. The feeble sunlight that filters through the trees gives no warmth. It’s still a few hours before sundown, when the gatherers are allowed to return to the village. Attacks by wild beasts aren’t unknown even in daylight, but such creatures grow bolder under cover of darkness.

She bends to pick up another dry branch, adding it to the pile under her arm. At least wood is plentiful here; dry brush and dead branches litter the forest floor. She gathers wood until her bundle becomes unwieldy, then carries it to the rickety wooden cart and adds it to the pile of wood already there.

The cart is just about full. She nods at the man guarding the cart; today it’s Sam, who turns his head to see her better with his good eye. She doesn’t know what fight or accident took the other. Everyone has their own scars and stories, and the villagers don’t ask.

Sam looks at the level of the wood in the cart, frowning judiciously. “Time to take it back.”

Two of the villagers come forward and take the cart’s wooden handle. The wood they gather goes to the storehouse, destined as fuel for the smokehouse where they cure their meat or the steelworks or the Wanderer’s hearthfire.

They can all snatch a rest while the cart is trundling to the village and back again. Anna flops down at the base of a gnarled tree. Sometimes she thinks of slipping off into the woods, farther and farther until she’s out of sight. She thinks her fellow gatherers wouldn’t give the alarm, and the Wanderer probably wouldn’t bother to come after her. There are always more wanderers, more desperate people stumbling in from the wilds, all dust and bones. If they can work, the Wanderer will house them, give them protection and food and fire.

Anna isn’t certain that the Wanderer can even tell them apart. It calls them all Gatherer; it doesn’t seem to know their names. Once she was switched to hunting duty for a week. She doesn’t know how to hunt; she has never learned how to use a sword or spear (though the hunters have rifles now, thanks to the Wanderer taking over a nearby sulphur mine). Each time she was sent out, she clutched her sword in white-knuckled terror, only too grateful not to become prey herself. The one time the Wanderer addressed her, it called her Hunter. Then she was made a gatherer again, just as suddenly. She still doesn’t know why.

She is not going to go to the Wanderer and ask. It terrifies her: mottled grey skin like a pile of rocks, six arms that wield swords and spears and rifles with deadly speed, six eyes that gaze in all directions from atop its head, a slit of a mouth. She looks down and tries not to catch its attention when it strides off into the wilderness with water and cured meat, when it comes back with its steel armor covered in blood. She doesn’t know why the Wanderer is here. She doesn’t know what it wants. The Builder only tells them that it’s better to do as the Wanderer says and not argue.

The cart comes rumbling back again, and Anna levers herself to her feet. She could run away, she thinks again as she picks up brushwood. But going out on the plains with the protection of a well-armed group is one thing. By herself—She’s seen what kind of creatures are out there. She thinks the Wanderer ships must have brought them, the strange sharp-toothed birds and the feral terrors. Whatever the Wanderer fleets have done to the soil, surely it hasn’t been long enough for blue jays and raccoons to turn into those?

If she could cross the plains, if she could reach a city—would she really be safer? Instead of the Wanderer, she would be under the orders of hard-eyed men and women with rifles. The fighting in the cities is fierce, they say, a grim struggle for power and influence and what resources are left. There is no electricity (her memories of welcoming yellow light spilling from houses and streetlights seem almost like a dream); even in the cities, they fight by torchlight and huddle around the fire in the concrete shells of buildings.

Would her fellow humans be more cruel? Could the Wanderer be kind? A few months after she came to the village, there was a terrible plague. Trembling, some of the villagers went to the Wanderer and begged for medicine. “There is not enough,” the Wanderer said in its flat voice. Anna thought that they would be left to suffer. But the Wanderer ordered them to go to the storehouse, counting out bundles of scales and teeth for them to take to the trading post and buy more medicine.

Is it kindness? Or are they simply another resource that the Wanderer stores up like furs and iron?

She lifts another bundle of brushwood into the cart, letting it tumble into the pile. Back into the trees for more wood. Anna sighs. She keeps turning it over in her mind, and each time she decides to wait. Not to leave, at least not yet. The work is tiring, and she’s glad of it. It makes it easier not to think; it means she can fall asleep quickly in the hut that she shares with three others, and sleep without dreams.

At last night falls, and she follows the torches and the rumbling of the cart back home, toward the hearthfire.


End file.
